


hands to tell your past

by ships_to_sail



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Fluff, Hands, M/M, Patrick Brewer is Gay, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:27:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21665917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ships_to_sail/pseuds/ships_to_sail
Summary: After thirty-plus years of his mind being the most confusing place to be, Patrick takes a great deal of solace in the physicality of his hands.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Comments: 40
Kudos: 189





	hands to tell your past

**Author's Note:**

> Life has been shitty lately, but this show is always wonderful. 
> 
> It's my first visit to the Creek, so be gentle <3

Patrick Brewer lives his life through his fingers. His hands. Touch and texture and being able to reach out and take hold of the world around him. It manifests in his practicality, in his affinity for casual touch, in his interest in the details of his universe. After thirty-plus years of his mind being the most confusing place to be, Patrick takes a great deal of solace in the physicality of his hands.

His memories are of fall ball - smooth curves of leather gloves and the grit under his nails that is sweat and salt and the red dust of the field - and the callouses he earned fixing cars with his father, the smooth skin of Rachel’s inner elbow and the way his guitar strings vibrate under his fingers, no matter how strongly he presses them into the fretboard. His hands never betray him, never ask him questions he can’t answer or undertake a task they aren’t sure and steady in completing. They do solid work, dependable and trustworthy work, and that lets Patrick think of himself the way other people think of him. And, given that Patrick doesn’t  _ know  _ what to think about himself, he’s glad for the favor. 

So Patrick uses his hands to build the outlines of a life. Photos on the wall, hung with blunt, sure fingers; dress shirt collars smoothed with rough palms on Sundays, and Wednesdays, and occasionally Saturdays for a business dinner or a double date with Anthony and his girlfriend Sarah. A kitchen retiled with tiles Rachel picks and Patrick nods at, because sure, why not, what does it matter what the tiles look like when the work will be the same for him? The first third of a song, plucked out on the guitar less and less frequently as his classwork picks up, and eventually completely forgotten when he and Rachel get really in to bar trivia nights because Anthony and Sarah are really in to bar trivia nights and Rachel is willing to pay the tab. An entire potential life built with the kind of reliability that comforts Patrick as much as it is beginning to suffocate him.

He should have known something was wrong when his hands start to go numb. At first, it was so very rare he’d forget about the last instance by the time the next rolled around. But then he graduates and gets promoted at the firm and it starts happening monthly. By the time Rachel proposes to him by asking him to propose to her, it’s happening a couple of days a week and Patrick is sitting in a doctor’s office waiting to get an MRI and texting his mother not to worry.

Which turns out to be the right call, because there is nothing to worry about. No physical reason he’s losing feeling in his hands. The doctor suggest meditation, and time off work, and maybe a vacation. Which isn’t surprising to Patrick, not entirely, especially given that every time it happens his heart feels like it’s going to hammer it’s way out of his chest and black dots swim in the corners of his vision. But what worried Patrick most was always his hands.

His time away starts as a chance to breathe, to reset and relax like the doctor ordered. Rachel is supportive of the first weekend, encouraging even into the second. By the third, she’s getting increasingly impatient and Patrick feels like every breath he takes gets a little deeper, his spine a little taller. His hands only go numb twice the first week, and don’t disappear on him at all the second. When the calendar turns into a new month, Patrick ventures out of his room for dinner for the first time, to a place called Cafe Tropical, and starts to pick through the knot in his brain - thoughts of Rachel, and his life with her, and the ghostly outline of a potential life sitting in front of him now. He feels lost, and unsure of himself, a feeling he hates and one that’s intimately familiar to any time he’s had to sit and think too long about his life.

The waitress - a friendly woman named Twyla with a smile that he’d seen from across the restaurant - is dropping off his sandwich when the man walks through the front door of the Cafe. He’s tall, taller than Patrick, and has jet black hair and the kind of jaw that could cut glass. Patrick wants to run his thumbs over the man’s cheekbones so badly he has to tuck them into his fists so he doesn’t start to trace the lines he can see onto the formica table in front of him. He has pins and needles in the palms of his hands and that, more than anything, tells him that he isn’t going anywhere. Not yet.

A week later and Patrick has a voicemail inbox full of the man’s - David, Patrick has to remind himself - voice and he’s filling out paperwork for Rose Apothecary. The pen feels like an extension of his hand, his handwriting blocky and black and optimistic, if that’s a way handwriting can look. He’s pieced together enough of David’s idea to know it’s a good one - and that he’s got help he can offer. That there’s something here he can help to build. It’s been so long since he had something to build that he was excited about, that sent lightning bolts through the pads of his fingers and made the inside of his wrists itch. David fills every limb of his body with a nervous energy he’s never felt before, and it’s exciting and new and it’s making his mind race in a way that feels in synch with his body and that’s new too and Patrick doesn’t know what to do about any of it.

So he promises to secure David more funding, and doesn’t miss the way David’s eyes track over Patrick’s body. Suddenly it’s not just Patrick’s hands that are interested in David and that’s - well, not new exactly, but certainly a bullet point on the list of Emotional Brain Stuff That We Don’t Think About Let’s Go Throw The Ball Around Instead, Okay. But his body has never lied to him before, so he buys David the nicest frame he can find at the local big box and he snags the first receipt for the store and even keeps the stupid slip of paper that Ray handed him day of his appointment with David, that absurd number-pull system that Ray had never, ever needed. All of the ephemera of their little business, which was quickly becoming a big part of Patrick’s life. He grabs them out from a folder in the fire safe every now and then, especially late at night when he's closing solo, and he runs them through his hands, lets his fingers play absentmindedly over the corners and edges and when the ink stains his thumb black he licks it off and pretends it’s David. 

When he asks David out for his birthday, on the date he knows is a date but won’t say is a date because clearly David doesn’t actually know it’s a date, he promises himself that he’s finally going to kiss David. They’ve been touching at the store, more and more since that first day, and Patrick’s body doesn’t know what to do with the mixture of textures that is David Rose. The chenille fuzz of his sweaters and the smooth warmth of his palm and the cold bite of the silver cuffs always arranged differently on his fingers. It’s this last fact that makes Patrick’s brain white out a bit every time, the surprise of it, the press of metal into flesh at unpredictable points that leaves Patrick wondering what else about David is an addictive contradiction. 

When David kisses him, it shatters Patrick’s world. 

Suddenly his hands aren’t the only thing that can touch David Rose. And sure, he’s done at least this much with Rachel, but that was so different it was like speaking in a different language. Being with David was like finally being fluent in something. And he’s touching David with his hands, and his teeth, and the smallest bit of tongue, and David’s hands are on his neck, his thumb barely grazing a pulse point and that’s different for Patrick, too, someone else touching him with as much reverence, as much desire and doubt and anticipation. 

So Patrick kisses him back, leans into David and wraps their hands together, finding the small stretch of skin where two of the silver rings fail to meet. He presses his fingers there, feeling the heat of his hands warming the outside of the metal. He looses track of the boundary between them and smiles into David’s mouth.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the poem "Hands" by Sarah Kay


End file.
